Sculptor and modeller, baptised in Norwich on 17 July 1748, one of a family of stonemasons and builders, based principally in that city. His father, Robert de Carle I, was a bricklayer, and of his known brothers, John de Carle (1750–1828) was a marble mason and builder and Robert de Carle II (bap. 1761; d. 1837), a stonemason. While still a young man, Robert Brettingham de Carle moved to London. In 1774, he married Ann Davy at St George, Hanover Square. In the following year he produced what may be the earliest of a group of salt-glazed stoneware jugs, at one of the Lambeth potteries, this, a harvest jug, is inscribed with the name of his mother-in-law, also Ann Davy, and her village, Yoxford (in Suffolk). Two more jugs, both dated 1781, are inscribed with the names of botanists, William Curtis (in Hampshire County Museum) and de Carle’s brother-in-law, James Sowerby (in the Victoria and Albert Museum). For his one appearance at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, in 1785, he contributed three portraits (two in wax) from an address in Stangate Street, Lambeth. By about this date he was working for the Coade artificial stone manufactory, also in Lambeth. Two signed works in Coadestone are known, both from 1786: a font (designed by the architect Richard Holland) in St Mary the Virgin and All Saints, Debden, Essex, and a lunette with a relief depiction of three putti around a funerary urn bearing a portrait roundel of his mother-in-law, fitted to the headstone over her grave in St Peter’s churchyard, Yoxford. His last known work is a Coadestone coat of arms, erected in September 1792 above the entrance to a shawl manufactory in Colegate, Norwich.
Bibliography: Bonhams Auctions: British and European Ceramics and Glass, London, 18 May 2016 (Lot 295); R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xix, 256; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 353–56.
Terry Cavanagh, April 2025